From birth, never did a shoulder-laid hand startle Tabby Jones. Her infant eyes— a pair of haunted little spotlights— met you the instant you walked in the room. Now, she is sixteen.

Lined up vertically along the fridge next to wide-smiling family portraits, her report cards shouted an uninterrupted “ahhhhhhh.” More impressive than her stack of high marks were a high stack of yellowing papers in Mr. Jones bottom drawer: Tabby’s diagnoses.

“An acute case of synesthesia,” jotted Dr. Mari. That week Tabby broke from flooding a coloring book with red crayon to flooding the dining room with worried babble about Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Jones found their neighbor ghost-white on her marble bathroom tiles, clutching to her chest.

“A perceptive, precocious youth, but nothing to worry about” Dr. Chang had written. They drove to his office with a ring of cake still smushed around to Tabby’s mouth. She pinned the tail on the donkey seventeen times; by the last attempt she was blindfolded with a duct-taped towel.

“A complete and total psychosis, induced by undiagnosed schizophrenia,” said Professor Wurst. That week, a seventeen car pile up killed six people, but never touched Mrs. Jones’ car; a result of Tabby’s insistent remarks to take route fifteen.

Twenty-four of these files sat in the secretary.

As Tabitha grew so did that uncanny nature and the Jones looked for alternative explanations. A voice dipped in Louisiana sugar gave the only answer satisfying to the Jones. Its owner sat with Tabby for one hour; two lone partitioners in an otherwise empty chapel.

“She can see through other people’s eyes,” Mama June reported kindly to Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Tabby nodded. And that was that.

For a while, things improved and Tabby opened up.

Over meatloaf, a tween Tabby dropped the remark “I can see through animals’ eyes now too” in front of her parents like a bundle of the morning papers.

One evening Tabby pulled her mother from the garden bed, as though a starter pistol fired that only she could hear, and flicked on the TV. A somber, balding newsman detailed that a factory had blown up; two hundred miles away.

She was a little car with a big, powerful engine. In the words of Mama June, just “growing into the shoes of her special, special soul.”

But a month ago Tabby started acting strangely.

She yanked her father’s collar, drawing herself close to his ear and said “Daddy you need to get rations, food rations,” and she sprinkled nervously into conversation “I love you mom.” “I love you.”

Her grades slipped, her acne flared, and a streak of gray formed in her long black hair.

Buckle up folks, the big kahuna this way cometh.

Lofting bags of rice onto the highest shelf her father finally breaks down.

“What is it, Tabby, please you have to tell us,” he begged his aged, sad child, “what do you see.”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“But it sees Earth,”

“And it’s almost here.”